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Music Zines

Time Travels In Jump Blues

Feel free to view, print for your own enjoyment, and print to distribute to music lovers everywhere as you see fit.
It's designed so the two pages go back-to-back, it doesn't really matter which way round. And then it's folded 3 times, you'll soon get the picture.

(The oringal mix link to spotify can be found here, bit.ly/jumpblues, but i've long sonce overstayed my free 5 play welcome in the green pastures of spotify so have jumped ship to 8tracks which is a lot more fun, a way better way to share and explore music, more DIY, and generally just feels a hell of a lot better, try it out!)

Time Travels In Rock & Roll

Finally and at long last here comes the Rock and Roll zine !
Though you may be forgiven for thinking this zine was the creation of a nostalgic lad cooped up in his bedroom with printouts of webpages and pritt-stick, because it was to a certain extent, this zine also has a bit of history.

It started in the small church riddled and picturesque town of Würzburg in Southern Bavaria. After finishing the jump blues zine I wanted to keep making zines whilst I was living out there, so of course I had to adapt to my new foreign environment. Thus, "Zeitreisen in Rock & Roll" was born many months ago in a German spring. I wrote it originally in English in notebooks and made a playlist, but the main muscle work was done by a group of good friends, they translated the vast majority of it and also helped tidy up my near-nonsensical attempts at translation myself.
The reason why I chose Rock & Roll for the subject of this zine was because of where I was and the people who I thought I'd be giving it to. I chose to do a zine on Rock & Roll because I thought, following the nature of Rock and Roll itself, it would be simple and easy to connect with people. This zine is only looking at a glance of Rock music of course. If jump blues was the zine about the birth of Rock and Roll, then this is the zine where Rock and Roll is finding it's feet, and once the feet have been found
dancing throughout the entirety of the 61 tracks you can hear on the 8track playlist.

The reason why there are so many tracks is because I made a playlist of 30 of I guess what I'd call the key players in this first wave of R&R, the ones written about in the zine. It was this playlist that was published in the German edition, which quite possibly may be uploaded in the future. On returning to the zine back in England, when I decided to make an English version, I wasn't happy to simply trot out the same old songs that I'd been listening to for ages. So I decided to find some new tracks to throw in the mix: therefore 61 songs, therefore 2 playlists.
As always feel free to read, listen, dance, print out, give to friends, give to family, give to strangers at your own discretion:

Time Travels With Alan Lomax

A zine with a couple of firsts: we decided to change up the shape and presentation, just for fun and the sake of a change really so this is our first stab at an 'Accordion' style zine, that's the official name for it, but we've also gone and used a landscape A3 paper layout to give us the extra width and all the possibilities for different folds this brings with it. But really the important first for this one was that it was a 'we' at all, this was a straight up collaboration-zine. It was a lot of fun sharing music and working together under a tight schedule, we thought we'd do it all in one evening, which turned in to a couple of heavy pritt-sticking evenings in the week leading up to Sheffield's very own Zine Fest, which was on Sat 6th March. We were in the university library up until about 1pm and were a little worried that we'd miss the party. We walked through the city centre still riding the high of the obsessive zine maker's zine binge, zines warm-of-the-press in our hands.

This was it:

We had a great time checking out the zines, which hailed along with their owners from Leeds, Manchester, some folk from the big smoke, and many besides, plus, of course, many representing Sheffield. I should have written this sooner and then I would have been able to remember the names of the zines I bought. I definitely bought a super recipe-based zine from a nice Leeds zinestress, but it was just too good to keep so it was given away as a birthday present almost instantaneously. Swapped some zines with the amazing Chella Quint, http://chellaquint.wordpress.com/, and as a result am a lot more learned in the ways of menstruation, by which I mean mainly theoretically. Did I find the zines useful? They were very interesting to read, especially with unsuspecting buddies who were just visiting for an innocent cup of tea, and I guess the best thing, which is one of the strongest cards zines have to play, is that it was a whole load of information told from a perspective that I would have just gone on living my life without if it was not for Chella's menstruation zines. Nice work.

So time for some music I suppose. Here is the playlist which you can listen to right here:

My buddy Al and I decided to write a zine about proper old skool blues, because that's what we both like a lot. And to make it even harder for us we decided to theme the whole zine around Alan Lomax, who was one of the first fellas to go around and record music that people just happened to be playing on their porches, or, more often, in chain gangs or in prisons. And from there we decided to only put on the playlist songs that Alan Lomax actually recorded himself. We just about pulled it off, with only one song not recorded live by Lomax, Fixin' To Die Blues by Bukka White. We know he did record it at some point, but could only find a later studio track, and that studio track is particularly fantastic, so on the playlist it went.

We found out so much about Lomax and there is a whole load of his work gradually going online at his legacy site http://www.culturalequity.org/. This site has tonnes of songs as well as pictures and video clips and interviews with many true legends. The range of music goes beyond blues to country, traditional, gospel, and music and dance from across the whole world. So check it.

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